ISAR imaging and cross‐range scaling of high‐speed manoeuvring target with complex motion via compressive sensing

For targets with extreme manoeuvres, inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging suffers from translational motion (TM), which is modelled as a one‐dimensional (1D) phase error, and non‐uniform rotational motion (RM), which is a multidimensional (MD) phase error that causes severe blurring in ISAR images. Full‐aperture data collection is often unachievable because of interference with other radar activities, resulting in sparse‐aperture (SA) data. In this study, the authors present a new framework for SA‐ISAR imaging and cross‐range scaling for manoeuvring targets based on compressive sensing. Instead of solving conventional optimisation problems constrained by a sparsity of signals, the proposed method utilises the sensing‐matrix estimation technique for ISAR image reconstruction using parametric signal‐model reconstruction. To do this, it looks for basis functions that best represent the behaviour of a sensing‐dictionary matrix comprising the observed SA data. The sensing‐matrix reconstruction is based on a modified orthogonal matching pursuit‐type basis function‐searching scheme. Finally, they generate a well‐focused and scaled ISAR image from the recovered complete ISAR signal using the conventional Fourier transform after the removal of signals corresponding to 1D TM and MD RM phase errors. They utilise both simulated and real measured datasets to confirm the effectiveness of proposed method.